Like Father, Like Son
by TheCloudedSpyglass
Summary: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson's son has vanished, and a boy is lying dead in the St Bart's morgue with an impossible wound in his chest. Suddenly, their fragile home is torn apart as forgotten deals are brought into the light, old enemies appear around them, and a dreaded stranger arrives in London, all trying to solve one crucial enigma; who is Hamish's third father?
1. Blackout

Like Father Like Son

The cold evening drew close around the warm yellow windows of the appartment. Inside, supper had been laid on a square foot of space cleared from the mess on the dining table, and the family were gathered round, talking cheerfully.

Sherlock was grilling Hamish ruthlessly on German grammar, while John put in a word here and there to try and keep them from each others' throats. Their pasta was growing quickly cold, forgotten in the irritated flurry of voices and gestures and scowls.

The scene was almost aggressive, but this was just normal for them. Silence was not unusual, but always marked trouble; peace, however, was completely unknown.

With its usual lightening swiftness the conversation had moved on to the detective's latest case. He was now baiting Hamish and John through a complex net of frail hints and false clues, leading them towards his own conclusion. He had got into the habit keeping the solution from John and even from the Police until the boy had worked it out for himself.

" – so the engineer's son claims to have been in Bristol by two, " added Mr Holmes, talking fast.

"He's the left-handed one?" interrupted Hamish,

"Yes, of course the left-handed one. Keep up."

"I'm doing my best, Father," snapped the boy. "I'm tired."

The detective sighed deeply. "Oh, you were doing so well."

"I'm sorry Father! I'm doing my best!"

"Oh no, really?"

"Sherlock!" muttuered John forcefully. "Leave him alone.!"

"John, do you think he really is this slow, or is he just trying to rile us?"

"Stop it. You know you're being unfair."

"Oh don't be so objective, John" said the detective dismissively.

"Stop arguing! I'll figure it out!" Hamish cut across them.

John glared at his husband, ignoring Hamish. "Objective?"  
>"Stop it!" scream Hamish suddenly, and suddenly there was a deafening bang from the area of the fuse-box, and all the lights went out. In the sudden dark silence, a stark contrast from the bright anger of moments ago, there was a sharp intake of breath from Sherlock.<p>

"The streptococcus," he muttered, then leaped to his feet and darted to the incubator.

"Right." John grimaced. "Fine, you check on your damn _bacteria, _and I'll sort out the lights, shall I?"

Hamish followed his Dad to the fuse box. In the anaemic glow of a phone-screen, the old soldier's face looked weary and lined.

"Why are you two always arguing over me?" said the boy quietly, toying with the defunct light-switch.

He was tall for a nine-year-old, thin but angular, with sweeping cheekbones that recalled his Father's, despite there being no actual genetic link between them. His dark hair was closely cropped, and in the half-light he looked blue and pale.

"It's not you. It's your Father," explained the soldier brusquely. "He's very logical, and sometimes we have differing opinions."

"About me," murmured the boy. Then, almost a whisper, "Is it my fault?"

"What? God, no." John looked at the boy in shocked amusement. "No, it's not anybody's fault. It's just the way it is, and that's, that's fine. Okay?"

"I guess."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"We both love you, alright? Promise me you know that?" John hugged his son quick and hard, and then leaned back and looked searchingly at him. "It's not your fault. Never think that."

"Okay, okay, dad, I promise."

"Good. When I get the power back, you watch some TV or something. Don't let him guilt you." He pointed at Hamish in mock-sternness, and the boy smiled a little.

"Okay."

Later, when Hamish was fast asleep, John padded out of his room to find Sherlock still hunched over his microscope by torchlight, making minute notes in perfect handwriting on the back of an envelope.

John carefully pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him. It was a long moment before the detective dragged his gaze away from the eyepiece. John spoke first.

"Are you going to call Natalia?"

"Do you really think it was just a power outage?" asked the detective sardonically.

"It could have been."

"Of course it wasn't."

"Then that's the third time. First that poor boy at Highgate, then the theft fiasco, now this. Sooner or later he is going to notice that something's wrong."

Sherlock blew a long meditative breath through his steepled fingers.

"I don't want to call it too soon. The deal was, until he's fifteen," continued John. "He deserves a chance, at least, at being normal."

"Normal is an illusion, normal doesn't happen. He is not normal. And technically, he has the potential to become a public menace."

"He's just a boy."

"Do we have to wait until he kills someone?" the detective's voice was cold and empty.

"Sherlock, please. Don't pretend he doesn't mean anything to you. Surely you've noticed he's more than just - a necessity. He's been here nine years! He's practically your son."

"John, please try to remember that we are not a family."

The soldier inhaled sharply, noticing the slight even though he didn't show it. The detective continued.

"Call Natasha. I believe we could at least make use of her advice."


	2. A Bad Start to a Tuesday Morning

A Bad Start To A Tuesday Morning

Hamish's rucksack banged his back dully as he walked down the long, grey road to school. The morning was cold and novemberish, with the sky the colour of cigarette-smoke.

There were so many people, always so many at this time in the morning. They flowed around his like water as he walked, ebbing and flowing and jostling and bumping. He could read their stories in their shoes, their elbows, the line of the eyebrow and length of the stride, just like his Father. He tried to notice everything, all at once, and it was exhausting.

They were waiting inside the gates, of course. His heart barely even sank any more, though he sighed. Nobody should see.

"Hey. Hamish. Hey Hamish! Are you still a gay slut?"

"Want some of my dick, faggot?"

The boy's bruised face shouted out that his father had beaten him again, but Hamish knew not to mention it. It only made things worse.

"Your dads are fucking gay!"

That one's mother still wasn't home. Hamish started to breathe faster, his fists balled. He kept walking.

"You want me to shoot them for you? That's all gays are good for!"

The third boy had spent the night on a doorstep and hadn't eaten. Hamish's heart thundered and he was much too hot.

One of them ripped his rucksack off his shoulders, spinning him round. They wanted him to fight them, but he didn't move as they poured his notes into the road, jumped on them, spat in his lunch, tore his textbook like ripping a child open. He didn't move. The first kick landed on his left shin. The second boy followed with a swing at his third left rib. He couldn't hear anything except a roar as they rained punches and kicks at his unresisting body, and he was so, so angry. He knew they were shouting, and he felt huge rage like vicious electricity in his arms and back and all over.

The first boy suddenly doubled over and screamed with a visceral wrench like agony. Hamish didn't move. Suddenly he found himself ten feet away, He wasn't scared, but a little surprised. There was another him standing where he had been. The second boy threw a wild punch at the image, his fist passed right through its chest, and he pitched forward onto the tarmac. Hamish knew instantly that the boy's radius had fractured in two places, and his nose was broken. The third boy fled. He was no fool.

Hamish stood staring at his two attackers in curiosity. He hadn't done anything, but they seemed to be lying on the ground.

It was about then that he noticed the blood.

Smooth and elegant, it spread from beneath the body of the first boy, pooling and flowing through the cracks in the pavement, reflecting a cracked and crimson skyline. His own unbruised face regarded him coolly as he bent down to peer into it. It was not deep but it was dark and vast like the ocean.

Hamish ran. 

Within thirty seconds of the killer's departure, the police had received four calls about the brutal stabbing of a young boy outside a school in Bankside, and it they arrived in full force twelve minutes later.

Meanwhile, it took the school over an hour to notice that Hamish was missing, caught up as they were with the policemen swarming the school. Children were being gently questioned in the cafeteria, the staff were filling out reports and the headmaster was having a quiet meltdown.

Eventually, the receptionist was patched through to John Watson's surgery, and asked him whether his son was with him. She declined to mention that there had been a murder outside the school that very morning. The doctor raced home, heart hammering, which took seventeen minutes. Hamish was not there. He texted his husband. That took three minutes. The detective came home. Another twenty-one minutes passed before John heard his light tread running up the stairs. It was now almost an hour since the boy had become the killer, and vanished.

Less than eight minutes after his arrival, Sherlock was texted by Lestrade, who asked him to come to have a look at a murder outside a school in Bankside. The two men looked at each other in unspoken horror, both instantly assuming the worst.

"Oh, God, no" moaned John softly. That only took three seconds.

They took a taxi to the school, without saying a word. For thirty-three minutes John tried not to picture his son lying cold and white on one of the stainless steel slabs in the sterile mortuary that he knew so well.

They arrived in time to see a thin corpse was being lifted onto a gurney and wheeled away, swathed in ugly sheets. A rim of young, red, weeping faces adorned the iron railings of the playground.

Sherlock burst out of the cab and pounced on Lestrade.

"Who was the boy? Who was he?"

As the DI replied John got in the way of the gurney, apologising to the paramedics. He heaved the sheet away from the dead boy's face, and sighed deeply with relief.

"Is it him?" asked the detective urgently.

"Who?" frowned Lestrade.

"No, no, it's not."

The detective did not say anything, but John noticed the desperate tension ebb away from his stance.

"Who's him?" The DI was still confused.

"Hamish is missing. We thought he, that he was…" He gulped. "I'll call him again."

"Do." said Sherlock, then turned back to the DI. "Alright, Lestrade, tell me."

"We were called at 8:24 this morning by several witnesses reporting a boy who had been stabbed." Explained the DI, as the gurney was pushed into the ambulance and driven away.

"Was there a weapon?" interrupted Sherlock.

"No."

"Damn." The detective

"We found his two friends, gibbering behind the cafeteria. Described a tall, dark, muscled man, some kind of master assassin if you believe them. Which I don't."

"Good. Just children, frightened children, their impressions are totally unreliable."

While they had been talking, John had bent down on the curb and picked up a torn and trampled exercise book. With his phone still at his ear, he turned it over and read the name on the front. His eyebrows rose sharply, and he quietly pocketed the book.

"John!" called Sherlock. "Let's go. There's nothing to see here, so we'll follow them to the morgue."

"Right," he replied, just as a cool female voice on the line told him that his son's number was unavailable. He hung up and snapped at his husband, "Wait one second. Our son has vanished, and you're going to follow that bloody case instead of finding him?"

Sherlock gave him an inscrutable gaze, and then stepped in very close to John, turning his back to the police and blocking them from the hearing of the officers with his shoulder.

"John, let me see that book you picked up," he said softly

John passed it over, and Sherlock ran his fingers over the boy's name on the red front cover, tracing the place where the pen had dug into the card. There was a large dark stain over half of the book, and the detective let the book fold open in his palm.

On the scarlet cover, the stain had seemed brown. On the white paper inside, however, it showed itself clearly as a rusty dried-blood red.

Sherlock murmured quietly in his husband's ear, "In this case, John, I believe that finding the murderer is the only way to find our son."


	3. In The Morgue

In the Morgue

Despite Sherlock's protests, John decided to return to the flat in case Hamish arrived there. They said a curt goodbye outside the school, painfully aware of the crowd of kids ogling them through the bars, and Sherlock drove to the morgue alone, just like the old days.

He gazed distractedly at London flitting by outside the window, grey and drizzly, an ocean of concrete and brick. Somewhere in that mess of disordered humanity, in an alley or a café or a tube station, the little boy he had come to love as a son was hiding out, listening for the police, terrified, guilty and blood-stained. Sherlock wondered what had caused Hamish to snap so violently. He had seemed balanced and calm, always exhibiting the same logical emotional detachment as his adoptive father, but clearly there was some deep well of rage beneath the surface, some exposed nerve; a pressure point.

It almost could almost certainly be linked to the moment last night when the fuse box had burst just as Hamish had become agitated. Sherlock had could come up with no explanation for the phenomenon, and that disquieted him. His rational self protested that it was mere coincidence, but he had learnt over many years that the most logical explanation is often not the truth. Logically, Hamish could not possibly have murdered a school-fellow, but then, very little about the boy was logical. Sherlock's mind wandered back to the mysterious circumstances of his arrival in their lives, but just then the cab pulled up outside Bart's.

Molly greeted him as he swept through the double doors into the cold tiled room, sounding distinctly less cheerful than she normally did. God knows she was used to cadavers, so normally even the most gruesome couldn't kill off her little-ray-of-sunshine smile. This was a child, though. That was fundamentally different.

The dead boy was laid out on the slab with a sheet covering him to the shoulders, exactly as he had imagined Hamish would be, as he and John had driven to the school. Molly tactfully informed him that the boy's name was Damien Wills, that he was thirteen years eleven months old, and that he had died of severe internal haemorrhaging and shock after receiving a stab wound to the abdomen.

Sherlock rolled up his sleeves and turned back the sheet, and instantly saw that Molly was completely wrong.

The boy had not been stabbed. That much was clear. No single blow could have produced such a large, ragged-edged wound, sprawling three inches long and one inch wide down his sternum. This was more characteristic of the exit hole of a high-calibre bullet, however no bullet had been removed from the body, which meant, taking into account the lack of any entry wound, that the boy had not been shot either. The detective ran nimble latex-gloved fingers over the boy's abdomen, probed the edges of the wound, and lifted the corpse's eyelid to peer at the bloodshot ruin of its eye.

The cause of death had not been shock, or internal haemorrhage, or even blood loss. It had quite clearly been the influence of a massive force, exerted over all the boy's soft tissues. It had squeezed his brain stem, crushed his thorax, and burst open the tiny delicate traceries of the capillaries in his lungs, his eyes, and his cerebrum. It was as if he had been caught in the turbulent pressure systems of a grenade blast.

Sherlock soberly folded back the sheet. This was infinitely worse than he could have imagined. Hamish had to be found, before this happened again.


	4. Natural History

John couldn't settle to anything. He tried to concentrate on prescription forms for his patients, but gave up when he found himself prescribing antidepressants to a diabetic. Then, he sat down to finish up the latest entry in his blog, a deeply boring case about identity theft, but he couldn't find any of the right words. He tried calling Hamish a few times, but his phone was still off. In the end he slumped in has chair staring at the place where Sherlock always sat, with his phone perched on his knee, worrying.

Nine years ago, they hey had agreed to take Hamish in as a special favour for one of Mycroft's secret service colleagues in America. The agent had been looking for a home for a very unusual child, and Mycroft had got wind of it, as he always did.

He told the man that his younger brother could be trusted to be the first to notice any change in the boy's behaviour, his mentality, even his physiology, and then to hand him straight back over to the authorities. What it was he was supposed to look out for, Sherlock had never been told.

Hamish had arrived in at a private airstrip in Cornwall one rainy November night nine years before, wrapped in cotton hospital blankets and a pac-a-mac to keep the wet off. Sherlock and John hadn't been able to get a flight, so they had taken the train out of London, and the detective had complained the whole six-hour journey. They had arrived at a depressing concrete station, and then had a half-hour walk through pouring rain to the airstrip. It was eleven at night, the path was swamped with mud and brambles and neither of them had a raincoat.

They had arrived, steaming wet and deeply irritated, at a small portacabin with warm light streaming from the windows, lighting up the military aircraft that was gradually cooling down fifty yards away. A short man with a receding hairline and an expensive suit had let them in, led them to a makeshift waiting room, and placed the most precious gift in the whole world into the soldier's arms.

The baby's tiny face was thin and blue-tinged with exhaustion, and he was fussing quietly in the agent's arms, waving one fragile fist around in the air in childish rage, but as soon as he was placed into the soldier's arms, he stopped crying and fell asleep. A blissful calm had descended, so that they could hear the swish and rush of the wind and rain outside. Even Sherlock's powerful mind seemed to stop still just for an instant as he stared at the face of his new son.

The agent offered to drive them back to London, and they accepted gratefully, glad to be spared from spending a night in a dingy B&B and getting the train home.

John had fallen deeply asleep in the car, with Hamish heavy in his lap, waking only occasionally to hear the murmur of conversation between Sherlock and the agent, and the comforting rumble of the car's engine.

Mycroft had never even for a moment suspected that the detective would grow to love the boy, and he certainly never foresaw that Sherlock and John would lie to protect him. They lied about the boy who almost died at Hamish's first school, Highgate, and about the stolen items that appeared in Hamish's room although he swore himself blue in the face that he had never taken them. They lied because, although they didn't want to admit it, neither of them could bear to see their son taken away.

Their lives had altered dramatically when Hamish arrived. In the beginning, John worked at the surgery during the day while Sherlock worked cases at night. They did their best never to leave Hamish alone, in case one of those famous 'Changes' suddenly happened, but as months went by without any indication that Hamish was unusual, they left Mrs Hudson in charge from time to time, and started going out on jobs again.

It was never the same, though. John developed an entirely new opinion of danger. He was still never afraid, still craved the flush of adrenaline that accompanied risking his life, but now he was always, always thinking of Hamish too. He caught himself thinking, What if someone hurts him, to get at us? What if he gets dragged into the media spotlight? What would happen to him if I died?

Sherlock and John found themselves instinctively avoiding high-profile jobs, dealing more and more with cases of theft and fraud than kidnapping and murder, refusing to get their hands dirty.

It was frustrating, of course, but whenever they came home bored and disgruntled from a dull case, they would find that Hamish had flooded the living room with Lego, or drunk his father's chemicals, or pulled out the drawers of the filing cabinet and scattered the case files around like confetti, and somehow, it was worth it.

Sherlock grew to love taking Hamish into museums and laboratories. They would wander for hours through the displays of bizarre fossils and extinct species at the Natural History museum, and Sherlock would explain everything that was not included in the displays for children. Hamish especially loved the Marine Invertebrates gallery, fascinated by the way corals looked like plants but acted like animals, spawning in synchrony thousands of miles apart. He and his Father were also fixtures in the Human Evolution section, where Sherlock showed Hamish how to run his fingers over his scalp and identify the features we still share with our ancient ancestors.

Sometimes, Molly would let them into Bart's late at night, and they would spend hours at the microscope learning about the tiny miracles of pollen grains and bacterial cells. When Hamish was very small Sherlock would lift him up onto the stool and hold him steady there as he gazed down the lens, guiding Hamish's fingers on the focussing dials to help him see more clearly. At these times, it was only Molly who noticed the expression of fierce tenderness on the detective's face, perplexed as he was by how much he had accidentally come to love him.

Suddenly John sat bolt upright, letting his phone slide off his knee onto the floor. He realised that he knew exactly where Hamish had gone. He couldn't believe it had taken him so long, he'd done this before after all.

Once, when the boy had smashed a tray of DNA samples with a rubber bouncy ball, he'd been so afraid of Sherlock's wrath that he'd run away from home for a few hours. He had fled to the Natural History museum, snuck at the back of a school group and hidden in the toilets for half an hour. Eventually, he'd grown bored and wandered into the museum.

His parents had found him sitting in front of the Neanderthal skulls, running his hands over his scalp just how his father had shown him.


End file.
